SAMAS
by NGTM-R
Summary: The Coalition States' most common series of power armor and those who wear them.
1. Death's Head

**Death's Head  
**It's difficult to describe the sensation of connection with a Death's Head. Some people describe it as a second skin, most say the suit feels as though you've suddenly grown about twenty centimeters. The link is, relatively speaking, intense. It isn't like a Super Sam or a Striker, where you can feel the suit moulding itself to you mentally somehow. Nor is it as casual as the Smiling Jack, which has the feel of a bulky set of clothes.

Sometimes, however, in preflight you can hear the computers talking. It's an intensely alien sensation. Something dark and warm gushing across the back of your neck where the main nervous system reader is. Technically this sort of feedback is not supposed to happen at all, but that only lasts for the first sixty days of a Death's Head's life. After that it starts, and no one has ever been able to discern why. Some people are more i to it then others and can feel the computers constantly; this usually means they wash out of Flight RPA training because nobody flies well with a continuous case of the heebie-jeebies.

The HUD warms up. It's not very complex. Altitude, angle of attack, airspeed, and attitude indicators are posistioned on the lower edge of your vision, hard LED-based gauges in right-to-left order. They're small; you need good eyesight to qualify for more reasons than the obvious one. Rightside edge offers visual sensor mode options via projection and threat warning indicator. Leftside has projected radar display.

Abbreviated preflight. A scramble call, no time for full preflight. The reactor is solid but at low power still. The main jets read as green. Wave the tech nearby to disconnect ground power. No time for proper preflight, to test the reactor, manuvering jets, or the main jets. If something goes bad, then you cut main power and fall right back into the hanger. It hurts, but it's better than dying because something blew the hell up on you.

A great deal of the control of a suit of powered armor is by the glance system, which tracks where your eyes look, and hand gestures. Neither of these is truly sufficient for a suit like the SAMAS, which must fly. With one hand occupied by your weapon, the other forms a virtual stick, tracking your hand movements as if you were controlling an aircraft. The system is somewhat arcane, and does not track the movements of your elbow or shoulder, only your wrist, so it can be used with the arm at any angle. The angle of your feet acts as a virtual throttle. No rudder controls to match no rudder; manuver is entirely by thrust vectoring in more recent models. The oldest, ten years ago and more, had control surfaces, but those could become damaged and cause a loss of control in midflight.

A patrol in the Burbs called for backup. ISS had the most assets in range. Hence we were scrambled. Internal Security Service SAMAS fill the role other police assign to SWAT. We are more heavily armed and a lot more heavily armored than most people's idea of SWAT even in this day and age, however.

"Angel flight of four, give us a vector."

"Come hard left to two three zero and proceed out three klicks. Call it when you arrive."

The Burbs around Chi-Town range from as nice as the upper levels to about equal with the sewers. A simple glance told me we were headed somewhere nice. Burb patrols consistently found the "citizens" there to be well-fed, well-dressed, and helpful. The military had a permanent recruiting station there and the neighborhood had produced several distinguished veterans in the recent war at Tolkeen.

This was going to be ugly at the end of the day no matter how you cut it. We're not supposed to treat the Burb-people as if they mattered as much as CS citizens, because they aren't. But they're _humans_, and ISS looks very coldly on anyone who is unable to see the basic value of a human being. It is the great difference from the military, who divide the world into _us_ and _them_ based on very different rules, and what makes transition between the two difficult.

"Angel flight on station." I called on the ground team's channel. "Squawk targets if you've got them."

In the old days, when I first started flying a SAMAS two decades ago, ground troops had to mark targets for us when they wanted something specific done. Flares, smoke, things like that. When the switchover to the new infantry armor came, they got new toys to play with. Among those was integrated IFF for everyone rather than it being an optional package, and the ability to designate targets for supporting air by range and vector from their own positions. It was a great improvement, and much safer for the infantry.

Two buildings were designated. I didn't see any fire in thermal or visual, and in the armor you don't hear a thing when you're flying because they have to muffle the jets right behind your head. Railguns, probably.

"Left, minimissiles. Right, we hit." Each SAMAS raised its off arm and pushed its thumb between the pointer and ring fingers, triggering its two-tube minimissile launcher at the left building, and swooped down at the right building. The left one went down in a cloud of debris. Method of entry was up to the individuals. At least two of us contemplated simply crashing through the walls since two railgun bursts were fired at the building to see if it could take that kind of punishment.

It couldn't, but nobody actually did the whole wall-breaching thing. Two of us landed on the roof. Two of us took the door. There was a crew-served railgun just inside that knocked the first SAMAS through it over though it failed to penetrate the PA suit's armor. The second cleared it with a long burst of railgun fire.

Working down from the roof wasn't easy. A SAMAS is only _roughly_ human-sized. Try clearing floor after floor of cubicles with that restriction and you start to see the problem.

Still, we made it down to floor five and there we met the enemy. Humans in nondescript bodyarmor, or probably humans; didn't see any sign of supernaturals and they died when their armor was breached.

A SAMAS is a vastly superior instrument to a regular infantryman because what a special forces trooper does by training and instinct, a SAMAS pilot accomplishes because his suit's computer tells him where and how to point his weapon to put a burst through his opponent's visor. This too was a new feature, brand new software being tested for ISS SAMAS use, and if we adopted it the Army might give it a go.

It worked. Sort of. My wingmates swore vehemently it simply cluttered their targeting, and I was inclined to agree that the extra visual clutter outweighed the utility; it did work but it blocked an unacceptable amount of your view while you lined up a shot. Three of them went down with holed visors in their armor but the rest scattered and put up return fire, and I had to drop the assistance program to keep track of the fight.

Small arms, lasers and the like, are no obstacle to a SAMAS suit except in large numbers. We simply rushed them, laying down railgun fire as we went. Three more died before we in among them, and after that it got sort of pathetic. Hitting a SAMAS, unenhanced, is not an effective method of harming it. The reverse is not true. Infantry that let PA suits get in among them are dead.

We took a couple alive, because, well, we're ISS. We like to have some people left over to question. The rest died, mainly of snapped necks and crushed ribcages rather than railguns.

That neighborhood was never nice again, though.


	2. Smiling Jack

**Smiling Jack  
**The Smiling Jack is the official replacement for the original SAMAS, the Death's Head model.

No, it's okay. Laugh. Spend a good five minutes pounding the table with your fist and laughing your ass off. Get it out of your system. Everyone has to after hearing that.

In truth, the Smiling Jack is more treated as the slightly dim younger child of the SAMAS family. Now, it's not really the Smiling Jack's fault. It's exactly what was asked for, a more compact, lighter version of the SAMAS with similar or slightly improved capablities. But when they ordered it they also ordered the Super SAM and the Striker, so they outmoded the little one by default.

The problem is one of doctrine. The Smiling Jack gets stuck doing odd jobs it's not really meant to because everyone loves the Super SAM a whole lot more. If they had issued Smiling Jacks to the Commandos and ISS as well as support for units going into an urban environment or other tight quarters where its smaller size would have been useful, everyone would have been happy. It would be a respected addition to the Coalition States' arsenal. But they didn't and don't.

If there was a counterforce to the SAMAS, something else of similar flight charateristics, the Smiling Jack would be highly regarded. Not as fast and tough as the Super SAM but highly manuverable and smaller, it would be considered the premier dogfighting machine. But there's nothing out there with a similar role or similar flight characteristics.

Instead it's treated as something to give new RPA Flight graduates before they graduate to the Super SAM. Kid stuff. It is, admittedly, somewhat suited to this role. The Smiling Jack is the easiest to fly, and the easiest to adapt to. It's not much more bulky in fact and certainly feels no more bulky to wear then a set of CA-4 infantry armor.

On the other hand, if I had a promotion for every time I've seen a kid killed because he couldn't run away fast enough for his lighter armor to be enough to save him, I'd be able to treat God and Emperor Prosek like PFCs. When the law of the land is that you live, you learn, you die, you're fucked, the less survivable option is a horrible training tool.

Everyone knows it. Everyone hates that poor, maligned PA-07 suit they're first issued because they know there's a very good chance they're going to _die_ in it before they learn enough to be able to properly defend themsleves. It's an ugly, stupid way to run an army, but nobody at the top is young enough to have gone through the meatgrinder they created so they don't know any damn better.

Today, a training run out of Chi-Town, and pray to god this is one of the Old Chicago Ruins' better days. So far no Rifts, no giant rampaging monsters, just light stuff, nonsentient critters that had moved in and weren't welcome due to their size, that we marked the posistion of for the attention of regular patrols. We practiced building assaults, entry method mainly. It's not easy to crash a suit through the wall and come out standing up. You have to learn confidence and learn your wingspan too, judge where you can and can't go, how quick you can stop and land.

The goal is to be able to make any kind of transitional manuver in three seconds. Officially. Unofficially, most people make it two, because if you spend three seconds hovering somebody with a missile launcher can blow your head off and use it for an ashtray. Two seconds is exactly how long it takes the wings to fold in or deploy and so asking new kids to do something involving that in less is judged unrealistic.

In case you're curious, an experienced SAM pilot typically lands on the fly, folding his wings before, after, or during without slowing down. The suit can hover without wings. We teach the rudiments of this as part of the building entry methods. You _do not_ crash through a wall with your wings out. You fold them and let your momentum carry you the last two or three seconds of flight. Some folks get it and start trying to apply it to other situations. Some don't, and typically wash out to a non-flight PA unit.

So as we formed up from another practice assault, we got shot at. Railguns and particle beams. I heard at least one muffled curse from someone who took a hit, but if they were cursing they were still flying. Another one rippled off his minimissiles.

"Tell me you killed something with that launch." I said.

"I don't know sir." My turn to mutter a curse. The good news was they all remembered enough of their Flight RPA Training to do what any good SAMAS pilot does when shot at: get lower. If they're shooting at you, you're not low enough. Only a Super SAM belongs in the clouds. The rest of us come back with green on the feet.

"Vector left, two one six, and stay between the buildings. If you see something shoot it."

"We going back, Lieutenant?" one of the newbies asked.

"You leave something? Nobody asked us to kill stuff on this run, just mark it." I often wonder why anyone in their right mind wants to get shot at gratitously. It's surprisingly common condition, even among those professions that one would assume require greater than average mental competence like Flight RPA. My job was to bring all these fresh-from-training lunatics back alive and that was what I intended to do.

More fire, but not much. We rushed through it, weaving a little, and put more buildings between us and the location, then marked it for attention from heavies; combat robots with Super SAM support at the least. "Call it in order."

"Deuce. Left arm glanced, it's glowing but it's not serious."

"Three."

"Four."

"Five. My right wing took a hit at the base. I'm not sure it'll close if I need it to."

"Six." The pain in her voice told me all I needed to know. "Penetration. Left foot. I can still fly for now."

"Four, Five, drop back behind Six." The unspoken part of the command was simple: if she starts to crash, catch her. "Skim the rooftops, direct course back to Chi-Town." I switched channels. "Chi-Town Control, we're going to have to cut this hop short. I have wounded."

"Medical will be standing by. Do you need assistance or extraction?" The controller was probably glad to simply have something to do. No major patrols out in the Burbs or the Old Chicago Ruins today.

"Not yet. Have a Locust ready though." The bigger of the Coalition's two helicopter gunship/transports would be enough to carry all our damaged suits back to base and carry a four-person med team out, where as the smaller Lightning would be barely able to fit a couple of medical guys and our lone wounded Smiling Jack pilot and her suit.

"Lieutenant we got big trouble here! Fast-movers!" _Karl Prosek on a crutch!_ Jets this close to Chi-Town, non-Coalition jets, this was the worst day ever.

Rapid switch back to the other channel with a glance at the comms menu I had up. "Dive for the deck and scatter by pairs with whoever's closest there! Six, stay with me." We didn't all make it. Missiles caught Two and Five about level with the rooftops. Of Five, I saw nothing more. Of Two, a pair of legs and a wing emerged from the fireball. "Six, talk to me."

"Hurts Lieutenant." Pain but no slurring. Her suit was doing what it could most likely, built-in medical gear dispensing stimulants to keep her awake and alert and coagulants to try and stop the bleeding.

There was a risk in continuing to talk. You could track RF, triangulate, hunt down the user. There was also a risk in not talking. If another pilot is injured, if they're losing blood, they could pass out with little warning. You talk to them, talk them through things, anything to keep them alert. "How bad are you bleeding?"

"Don't know sir. Foot's still there." Six took the lead for the same reason I had detailed two others to drop behind her before: there was a chance if she passed out I'd be able to catch her before she crashed. At the very least, I'd see her crash and be in a position to makr it and stay with her until extraction. Crashing a SAMAS is rarely dangerous, one of the few things it has going for it over a conventional aircraft. We're slower and lower and very well shock-protected, so it's hard to kill yourself crashing. It is, however, easy to get knocked out. Being unconcious and alone in Old Chicago is its own death sentence.

"Doesn't look too bad." I said reassuringly. There was a hole in the bottom of the foot with the edges pushed inward. It was a stupid design flaw, they'd assumed since we wouldn't be stepping on things like landmines we didn't need much protection on the bottoms of the feet and forgotten that anything facing _down_ was subject to ground fire, which was our real greatest threat. It was a through-and-through. If it hadn't been, what looked like a railgun round would have bounced around inside the foot and lower leg and absolutely shredded both of them, killing Six rapidly. There was blood, but not much, nothing like the stream I'd feared.

"El-Tee, please don't bullshit me. It's fucking awful." Six wasn't happy at all.

"You know full well that I'm nearly thirty percent bio-systems by weight. You'll be fine." I shot back. "Come on, not much further now." Chi-Town's defenses had responded to the incursion with a storm of heavy laser and missile fire, and though I couldn't say whether they'd actually killed the jets or just scared them into hiding, it didn't much matter from my perspective. We were going to make it back.


End file.
